The Sickening of Stories

On February 25, 2016 By NW FilbertIn creative writing, fiction, Language, meaning, stories, Writing4 Comments

jose-parla-broken-language-exhibition-haunch-of-venison-recap-1

I am not certain why stories sicken me so. By “sicken” perhaps I mean something closer to depletion or boredom, gluttedness or exhaustion. By stories I mean shaped texts of language – narrative fictions, philosophical arguments, journals and declarations and ads.

“I don’t know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.”

– Samuel Beckett, The Expelled

It has something to do with that. My own writings sicken me faster than others, but all writings, once entangled in plots, developing characters, or pursuing a narrative…tend me toward disgust.

The motion of “progress,” falsity of construction, illusion of meaning begins to fray as language gets “handled” or forced into order. The squeezing and pressure and molding of shaped texts, especially as they develop into sections, seem bound to conform to the size of the creator. Many texts start out wildly, with chaotic promise, almost infinite exploding potentials – but threads develop, and lines, sentences form, and shapes, causes and results, actions and repercussions, and ever so surely the mass is twisted to the size of a snake. And then I’m tired, exhausted by “how alike they are.” We are. It is.

Language imploding and exploding. This is what I want. Language available like elements. Language operative in a chaotic surround, like experiencing. Language that doesn’t know next. Language becoming, not necessarily or even especially something – just becoming within/without human.

So I read words, less to learn or be entertained, less to follow or empathize, less to argue or understand, and more to exist in a sea of potential communication and commerce, to respond, to be open and closed by each term and their relations, to go on.

As if language were oxygen, blood, water. As if language were soil. As if language were all these mystifying, crazy, strange, different and unknown others surrounding us everywhere. As if language were environment. Context. Medium. Not tool. Not machinic. Not discipline. Not function. Not at our service or in our control.

We know that it’s not. It does indeed possess others – carries and transfers multitudes – times, cultures, histories, humans, vagaries of meanings. It is untamed and unpredictable, available and unsolvable, like ourselves. But we often use it for us rather than in or with us. We often torment it into cages and patterns, (I’m doing it now) – forced representation, desiccated potentials – marks of expression or intention or persuasion or telling.

I declare. I unravel. I investigate. I express. I guess. I wonder. I commit a sound to form. It leads. I resist. I say. I listen. It leads (each of us in particular ways). I resist. I ponder. It takes shape. Incites. I want. I resist. I query.

Doing and undoing language becomes the only way to use it and avoid strangling it down to my size. Persisting and resisting, experimenting and erasing, canceling / canceling-out, backwards, forwards, at the angular. Listening to others. Throwing in, throwing away. Desist. Insist. Consist. And delete. Chaos and pattern. Detangle, knot up. Fracture. Fragment. Avoid. A void. Void and null and emergent. Perhaps. Perhaps. The attempt to leave open. It suffers to form.

Sickening me.

Spring Forward – Saving Daylight

On March 15, 2015March 15, 2015 By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, life, meaning, Music, Philosophy, Poetry2 Comments

Taken with a feeling of grandeur: a premonitory greatness arising with convergence. There are uncertainty principles and the bafflings of mathematics as one ranges across scales. Relationships over time and fictional emissions, philosophies, transpositions of experience…and sometimes, somehow, they inextricably and irreducibly link up, reciprocally foster…and generate moments of novelty. Perhaps this is indicated with the term emergence. There is music, too, and emotion.

A sense of sense. Of universal process in which one plays a micro-part, participation. For the time – being and becoming seem joined. There may be love, generation, sometimes even intuition of revelation. Simply processes – ongoing self-organization – of “selves,” and smaller and larger collective, complex, and dynamic systems.

Something like “meaning,” I suggest. Nobody gets what I mean.

Which represents entropy. Things falling apart even as they arise, conjoin…together.

Things I do not mind. Emergence / entropy … it’s all dynamic – which is what I’m thankful for in the now. “Alive” perhaps we’d call it, un-“dead,” – a state I’m thrilled to avoid.

****

Of course there’s a “Her,” and a “Them,” or “they,” – my spouse/partner/girlfriend/significance-of-Other … and the offspring numbering 1-4 – the “matterings that matter” in me… my hand and body, pen and paper, & the complicated processes between that emit some strange result.

Physics tells me “strange attractors” (at that relational scale), I suppose it’s literature’s “muse,” romance’s “one,” the what-fors and what-nots equaling “It,” equaling “unknown,” equaling “that to which things tend.” Optimization, in a sense (if only a fantastical one).

Depending on the color of the glasses. What hole is peered through, by whom, from what angle. Perspective. Outlook. Relation. Some mean free path I’m on. Perhaps now a ‘we.’

“I” feels uncomfortable, unnatural. The idea there might be a group-of-me consoles. If only one (other, more). If only a “you — too?!”

– Emily Dickinson

something like that.

Dancing like cancer survivors…

At least grateful we’re experiencing

That’s a sort of Spring-Forward, is it not?

(Parenthesis) : Swarm – Becomings

On January 7, 2015January 7, 2015 By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, Experience, Experimenctes, human, Language, meaning, Poetry1 Comment

(Parenthesis) : Swarm

developing concept, ideas, form

Confession: for me the process involving humans crafting and innovating artifacts is (perhaps, nearly) as pleasurable and fascinating as the delight and enjoyment of the “accomplished” creation / artifact / best-of-my-ability result.

Today I plunged into a work I project for my future – a collection of poetic writings with a provisional cohesion designated by the titular nomenclature (Parenthesis) : Swarm. I am offering the beginnings, inchoate guesswork, anticipatory effort, languaging hoping to find some concretion or sense – in case others too are fascinated by the ways in which we humans find forms, structures, outlets, mediums for the expression of our experience.

Poetry depends on its realization to activate and actualize its purposes. I think that form and structure, metaphor and language rudiments all occur as potencies – possibilities, options, offerings – to both direct and elicit, open and enclose, what we are moved, determined, or curious to communicate.

Here lies (or rises) the inception of one of this year’s projects for me… for better or worse, I hope it provides instigation or inspiration in you concerning the prospects of concocting, explaining, depicting, describing, or mediating some forms of human experiencings of our living, our worlds.

(Parenthesis) : Swarm

assaying beginnings

(The blue was an empty sector of sky) :

before the ascending clamor of birds,

blackbirds, maybe. Or wrens, sparrows, the murther of crows

at which point : (monochrome)

(Soundless activities = black / white) : an argument of colors.

–

(White page. Blank. Emptiness. A void) : A chaos.

Sounds, ideas, emotions bum-rushing, flood-filling, desire-aching to mark up, cross out, cross-hatch, scribble-claim, create/destroy the unwanting, unwanted : (Blank page. White. Unlined. Refusing).

–

(White noise. A chaos. A filler) : (A Parenthesis) : A Swarm.

–

Rising up or rising down? Its violence, this freedom (this emptiness, bereavement) : this horde.

(If parenthesis sounds aside reflective calm) the lettered patterns are closing in, are pressing, encroaching (an erasured calm).

–

There are (Breath-gaps, Awareness) : while we survive.

Endure infinity, perception, experience : ALIVE (reflect. dream. prepare to become).

(Sleep-freedom) : surreality of anxious dreams.

(The “little deaths”) : vigorous and belabored, exhaustively lusted , our desires.

Like fires, like (Ash). (A remains, an inchoate.

A beginning) : an actuality.

–

If triggering happens – within swarm – directions will alter towards (flow)

An isolation (becomes compatible). (We thrive) or are disjointed.

Differentiation (in accord).

(This is how it ends) : in its beginnings.

–

You arrive – a great undoing – traumatic archive. I retreat

(or receive, select the join). Independence (community).

The surge : (the Swell). We swarm – the two, no six, no twelve

(of Us). The (love) : and discord. (Arrangements) interrupted.

(Habitude) : and nuance. (The Parenthesis) : The Swarm.

Back to School Preparation: “Gleicked”

On January 17, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current ReadingLeave a comment

David Foster Wallace – “both a quantum of information AND a vector of meaning”

On November 11, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing3 Comments

ah how I relish in his mind and language…

Deciderization 2007 – A Special Report

from

Chaos Pieces : Election Day

On November 6, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings2 Comments

Election Day

The way things that seem to need doing impose mayhem on those things we were wanting to do (vice-versa).

A sort of ratcheting of oddly shaped pieces tumbling down towards one another on an inclined plane. Necessary bits and fragments of desire rattling against, around and into one another, oppositely directed, apparently, and all with force or momentum (time, change, survival). They clatter. They clatter and clutter, like there’s a microcosm of chaos in us, the spillage of some enormous container of Legos.

Is this unfamiliar?

Something, always, functioning as noise in the wavering systems of our message(s)?

I want. I need to…. A hunch, an intuition. A concrete demand. An idea spawns. And tasks arise.

That kind of oscillation is what I’m talking about. And it goes both ways. All ways.

I set about a chore and am derailed by an idea. I dream and the over timer intrudes. I breath and it hitches to a cough.

Not that it’s always that way. Sometimes the texts come right on time, just when I was getting up anyway. Sometimes the activities that need the doing, also fuel the dreams. Think of such a time.

No wonder it’s called “flow.”

Yet it hardly seems “reality,” or “daily life.” Perhaps that’s only me, that the pieces that construct me are preiteratively cross-purposed? Maybe my fragments’ forces are centripetal (or centrifugal), either way multi-directional and simultaneous? ADD? ADHD? “Life?” Speaking animal?

Like Election Day.

N Filbert 2012